JSngry

Who is this guy?

Oh yeah, found this one a few years ago and bought it explicitly because of that drawing. Looked so much like Yusef, and the album wasn't but a few bucks, so why not, right? A fine record it turned out to be too!

And the more you listen, the more you hear the splices, which confirms the "hang on every note" attraction.

Too much math for R&B.

This one was in the house growing up: Free EPs in a picture sleeve with pretty girls (plural) with your 6-Pack (that's what a "carton" was back then...) of diet citrus soda, THAT'S WHAT MADE AMERICA GREAT GODDAMMITI!!!!!!!!!!

It's fun.

That's a pretty good record. Roy Ayers came to the game with mainstream skills, and here they are (as also are Jack Wilson & Curtis Amy) . Don't sleep on this one!

In the very early 70s, Down Beat offered that record as a bonus if you subscribed. By the time I got my own, it was The Gap Sealer, so hey, still good.

But anyway, the dude got monotonous and kept getting monotonouser and monotonouser. If Hindemith was so prissy about having "only" twelve notes (and that was his first mistake) SOMEBODY should have cracked on Evans about how we only have two hands, it's important that we use them carefully. That constant left hand of his pounding along with his increasingly predictable right hand lines, it's not the sound of a man freeing up, it's the sound of a man locking up, freezing up. It bugs the shit out of me, there's NO freedom there, just an increasingly claustrophic pounding, like Lennie Tistano and Red Garland got captured and sewn together and they struggled in vain to get free of each other, and like one of those Chinese Finger Traps, the more it pulls, the more trapped it gets. The dude doesn't sound like he has two hands, he sounds like he has one hand with ten figures. Sometimes that's a compliment to a pianist, but in this case, it's not. Two words about two independent hands - Earl Hines. Not only do you have this monolithic poundcompgoing on, it's going on with the tense internal time that gets further and further on top of the beat until at some points, it does actually cross the line into rushing. A rushing, claustrophopic pounding. YUCK. Somebody should have set that boy down and sent him to Lexington or someplace, someplace to rehab his mind. But now, hey White Guy Hung Heavy With Miles Playing Beautifyul Sensitive DREAMY Piano, take about what "the word" needs now....I don't think anybody was honest with him about how bad he was getting, and he lacked the internal courage to be honest with himself. There was a segment of the population (aka "the world") who needed "Bill Evans" as a "hero" or "model" and there was equally an industry that was more than happy and able to provide them their "Bill Evans". Bill Evans himself seemed to be high most of the time, more than happy to play the role that gave him the ability to stay high. Must be doing SOMETHING right, eh? I'm serious about this. I've listened to more than a few Bill Evans records from all periods of his career, and monotony is the word that comes in at some point before the record is over. Earlier on, yeah, it was a voice, a "style" if you will, but it turned pathetic and never got better. It's neither "sensitive" nor "inventive" nor...anything except tense, claustrophobic, and limited both emotionally and musically. At times it gets repulsive. It's the sound of a prisoner turned puppet to his own damaged neurological impulses. Even a record that engages at some level, like the Montreux album with Jack, I mean, really I can't make all the way through one side of the record without being ready for something completely different when the side is over. And that's on a GOOD Bill Evans record! In the ecosystem of mainstream popular jazz piano of, by, and for damaged psyches in denial - ultimately, Bill Evans is the devolved Yin to Oscar Peterson's eternal Yang. Again, YUCK.

hoping that those are strawberries?

If it would have been Bill Evans in that car wreck, we'd mourn the lost of so much unfilled promise. As it is, it's kinda like, ok dude, you had your chance and blew it. Promise not unfulfilled, promise squandered. SO much useless music for SO long....after so much superb playing. But, you know, he made his choices, as do we all. Then time runs out, and there you are....were.

The assumption there is that I'm looking for them? Why would I be doing that, I know what I like (and why), I don't need "a lot of jazz fans" to help me with that.

Hey, this is the same ownership that was busy pimping impulse!, Emarcy/Mercury, Verve, and other "status" labels/artists. Fantasy was pimping their brands, and had the good sense to pimp the image at least as much as the artists. In that world, a record like Dangerous Dan Express doesn't even make it above ground to get on the radar. fortunately, there was/is Japan, and those Anorkans are very aware of that.

Yes - deservedly damned to Eternal Damnation Design Hell (and I will keep my foot on that cellar door along with everybody else's so they don't ever escape), but fuck it, they got the records out. Not just Muse, but Atlantic, hello Fathead/Hand Crawford.

Oh yeah. It's there. If there can be BingleRosieHerdyherdMoSatches with the Mosaic brand of legitimacy-conferring that comes with that, then there can sure as hell be Bill Barron. Bill Barron is the Tina Brooks of the 21st Century. The question is - will Mosaic be the Mosaic of the 21st Century?

No! Ready to be part of a comprehensive Mosaic big box including the Savoy records and those off-label mid 60s dates!

That was for the catalog from the earlier days of the label (and including some of what was done for Cobblestone). Joe Fields and Don Schlitten each got custody of "their kids" (and there might have been an orphan or two). But Fields-Muse lasted a good long while on its own, got into a deal with Savoy Jazz (which then became or was already part of Artista), and IIRC, Fields folded Muse, took a little nap, and then woke up refreshed (a good nap'll do that for ya') and started, what was it, high note?. IIRC, he said he was not interested in investing the time or resources needed to "get his label back" or something like that. And that kinda made sense, b/c there was little, if anything, to distinguish the first High Note releases from what the same people were doing for Muse, right? Same records, really (and I meant that in a good way). But lost are what Muse was starting to do with a certain group of emerging young NYC players, many associated in some form or fashion with M-Base. Cindy Blackmon, Lonnie Plaxico, Wallace Roney, plenty of records being made there. Not all of them necessarily good, none of them really great, but still, a scene, an opportunity for a group of players to organize for domestic record dates of original materials on an established "mainstream" label. Never a bad thing, that.

A lot of that catalog had the "stigma" of being "commercial" in one way or another, Like Burrell's The Tender Gender, it's an album about songs about girls. It's not real "exciting" or anything, it's just a good record. Tiings are all radio-friendly too, so yes, "commercial". but BFD. It worked. No need for stigmatizing the facts of life. And then there's Richard Evans - not the most inventive or original arranger, just one with an ear towards what would play on the radio. 1966, hey yeah, 2006, eeeeewwwww jazzsnobs are repulsed. What would really benefit the catalog is not single album reissues, but a knowing, loving packaged approach, putting albums together to represent the artist's catalog cumulatively. You would get a damn good Lou Donaldson out of that, an essential James Moody set, and good lord, the organ records (they'd have their own Legends Of ChicAcid Jazz series right there...)...and the non-Mosaic-ed Ahmad Jamal records....Ramsey Lewis post-Young/Holt, especially when Maurice White was on the gig, and Charles Stepney was at the helm... And omg, if anybody had the gumption and the money to do a loving, knowledgeable, comprehensive Charles Stepney retrospective...that would be a deeply prized piece of my collection. There is so much there. It's not necessarily a catalog the lent itself well to the single-album reissue paradigm. But that paradigm has come and gone, as has probably the reissue paradigm in general. But you got some good records in that catalog to do something with. As for the owners...if you buy the Chess/Checker/Argo Cadet catalog, what are you buying it for? For the blues records, right? And even then, what, 3-5 names, mostly, right? And with good reason - you can sell the shit out of those records from now until forever. But everything else that comes with that? Hey, it all just came with that burger, like the fries you don't care if you get or not. And Bill Leslie? Not even a stray fry, more like the toothpick that you take out and throw away before you even get started. Not even a tasseled tooth pick at that.

Only attended a Jazz Showcase event the year I was in Chicago for the Jazz Festival, and it was at a fancy hotel downtown, but I like how it was never a "place", it was a "thing". Pretty amazing run, and kudos to him for attempting to always keep it real, as he knew it.

Odell Brown! Sonny Cox! Bill Leslie! Thornell Schwartz! Sam Lazar!

Argo/Chess/Cadet ended up with Universal during the CD Reissue Boom, correct? They did a few things here and there, just not very many. I know they did the Oliver Nelson record (but NOT the Lou Donaldson record with Oliver nelson). Considering that those labels were out of Chicago and catered to a certain demographic in their time, that's Strikes 1 & 2 about getting a knowing treatment a few decades later. Plus, their LPs could be on the short side, And the label's rather shoddy treatment by pre-Universal owners (remember all these B&W covers and then the LPs that had the same front and back covers)...I bet that cheapened the catalog's prestige/mystique/whatever. They also never (hardly) repackaged any LPs, so the original covers never got updated. sometimes that was good, but sometimes.....not. But there's some DAMN good records there, a lot of damn good records, actually. Long overdue for some loving hands to massage all the goodness that is tensed up inside that body.

Kins of Blue aside, Jimmy Giuffre + Paul Bley = more, more better, more lasting, more inytiguing, less cliche-able music than Miles Davis + Bill Evans.

Ok, but...Russell's "LCC" was in his mind and thoughts and conversations LONG before it actually got published. That was just the final result of a long thought process. Hell, check out the intro to "Cubano-Be, Cubano Bop" - nobody in jazz was thinking like that at the time, nobody. To think that Russell as not thinking about modality as an alternative to choral improvisation before the formal "LCC" is missing the point, imo. Also, I will not here nor before nor anywhere else suggest that Russell was "the main influence on KOB", but I will suggest that it was his lens as much as anybody's through whom the ultimate vision was filtered. I think that without that particular, direct experience that Evan turns into something else, no doubt equally interesting, but, really, that first Evans record on Riverside, what's there to indicate anything like what happened once he started getting out in the world? George Russell attracted a lot of top shelf, theoretically-curious musicians of the time. Bill Evans was certainly one of them, probably the one best-equipped to realize that there was another side to come out on, and then to do so (too bad he punked out, but so many do, at least he did go there before shirking back). Put another way - if there was no KOB w/o Bill Evans, what kind of Bill Evans would we have had w/o George Russell? And who did we - any of us - have before we had George Russell? btw - I will always take Paul Bley, regardless of free or non-free (like, what does that mean, really?). Paul Bley is, Bill Evans was.

I mean, why we gotta always name shit after people? It only encourages them!